Justice Samuel Alito was the featured keynote speaker at the American Spectator’s annual Robert L. Bartley dinner at Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel last night. Along with taking a crack at the new vice-president elect (h/t Politico), he also joked about the famous 2008 Obama campaign mantra of “Hope and Change.” (Eyeblast.tv has the audio uploaded here:)

On November, 29 1967, Secretary of State [Defense] Robert McNamara resigned in protest over the war which he had personally presided over for a number of years.

On November 30th, Eugene McCarthy announced that he would seek the Democratic presidential nomination promising to restore hope and bring about change.

Now I’ve been thinking a lot about that time recently and in particular about how things might have looked in those days to those who saw themselves in the vanguard of the legal profession. The law had changed quite dramatically in the 1960’s, and those in the vanguard at that time, I think, certainly anticipated that in the coming decades there would be quite dramatic movement in new directions.

Justice Alito also jokingly noted that his own submission to the American Spectator, pitched many years ago, was refused by the magazine at the time.

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